When you create a website, there are plenty of things to take care of – from a hosting provider to navigation and functionality. And this can be rather frustrating, to say the least.
Some tasks within this process might be easier to handle. But what about other web development stages that might not be as obvious?
The truth is that simply designing some site isn’t enough to make it thrive these days; you also need to make it SEO-friendly, and we’re about to tell you how.
Why does SEO matter for business?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the cornerstone of a strong web presence. By tweaking your site’s technical, on-page, and off-page elements to match the needs of users (first) and search engines, you ensure that you acquire visibility on the web.
In the long run, SEO enables you to:
- Get in front of your prospects;
- Advertise your business cost-effectively and gain brand recognition;
- Boost user experience (and thus, satisfaction and loyalty);
- Establish credibility and trust;
- Gain a significant competitive advantage.
Why think about SEO while creating your small business website and not after?
Despite clear benefits, the unfortunate truth is that many small businesses still don’t have an SEO strategy. This is a huge omission. To fix it, you should think about SEO before and during building a website, not afterward.
Why?
While a fairly large part of SEO is formed of keywords and quality content, which you’ll get to further down the road, the technical performance and design of your website can have an adverse effect on your positions in search results (rankings), eventually pushing you back in your efforts and making you rethink how your site looks and works.
For this reason, it’s pivotal to prioritize site design and development built around web SEO, as it can save you time and help you achieve the desired results faster.
How to make a website: 9 steps to SEO-friendly web development
1. Get clear on your objectives
Building a website should start with identifying the specific purpose you want it to accomplish. For example:
- Attracting traffic
- Making sales/generating leads
- Demonstrating your work portfolio
Depending on your specific goal, you may need to leverage different design and architecture strategies, as well as opt for different tools in the website creation process.
For example, suppose you plan to launch an online store whose core purpose is to make sales. In that case, you want to focus on making the users’ shopping experience flawless through secure payment gateways, convenient shopping features, well-targeted product pages, etc. You may even create your store via a trusted eCommerce platform like Shopify to save time and money on web development, as it already has all the features you need.
2. Pick a suitable platform for your small business website
As a small business, you may have restricted human resources and budget to build your site. The good news, though, is that you can save time, money, and effort while also crafting an excellent website. You just need to pick a suitable website platform.
Here are the top options to look at:
WordPress: Best CMS platform for content creation, sharing, and management. It already features many great SEO tools to make your site rank high. A good pick for sites that aim to attract traffic and leads.
Shopify: Best eCommerce platform tailored to the needs of online stores. It’s convenient, intuitive, user-friendly, and SEO-ready. Perfect choice for sites that are aimed at making sales.
Wix: Best for search engine optimization needs. It’s known for user-friendliness and diversity of design templates. It also features many advanced SEO tools and a dedicated SEO dashboard powered by data from Google Search Console. It also has solid eCommerce capabilities. It’s a good choice for sites with different objectives.
Squarespace: Best for demonstrating your work, booking appointments, and handling sales. It might be a lesser-known solution, yet it’s a powerful builder for sites with different purposes.
3. Pick a reliable hosting and domain name
Web hosting is what makes your site accessible on the web. Yet, that’s not the only reason why it matters. A hosting provider also affects several crucial performance features of your website, such as loading speed, uptime, security, scalability, and more. Hence, you should pick it wisely.
The key things to keep in mind when making your choice are:
- Server speed and performance
- Server location and CDNs
- Security
- Uptime reliability
- Resources for scalability
- Technical support
- Cost
As for a domain name, it stands for branding and credibility. When it’s short, branded, and memorable, people will be more likely to remember it, which can enhance the number of branded searches you receive. Eventually, it can also affect your web SEO.
Ideally, you need to pick a domain of your brand’s name. Not less importantly, you need to pick a suitable top-level domain (TLD) extension. If you run an international site (or hope to expand), standard TLDs like .com, .net, or .org should work best. However, if you’re targeting a specific market and want to dominate local search, then geo-based TLDs, such as .us (for the USA), .uk (for the UK), .de (for Germany), and so on, should be your best bet.
4. Plan the architecture and implement your business website design
When you’re ready to start building your site, begin by planning a logical architecture that establishes a hierarchy between your pages. Start with the primary pages, like a home page or landing page, and move logically to subsequent pages, such as about us, blog, contact, and so on, grouping related pages accordingly.
When your sitemap is ready, you can handle the design. Luckily, implementing business website design with the aforementioned builders is easy and quick. Here are some tips to help:
- Pick an SEO-friendly theme or template;
- Pick colors that align with your brand identity;
- Choose readable fonts that also reflect your brand;
- Add your logo to your website’s header;
- Use other available customization features to adjust the template’s look to your brand.
5. Research keywords and develop optimized content
When you create a website, filling it with the right SEO content is the key to helping it appear in search engine result pages (SERPs). To do this, you first need to research relevant keywords.
Leverage reliable keyword analysis tools to explore dozens of search queries relevant to your business and pick those with the lowest competition and the highest search volume. Target both short and long (more specific keywords) for maximum outreach.
After you have your keywords, learn what kind of content your audience is looking for. To do this, leverage social listening, customer feedback, trends research tools (e.g., Google Trends), and competitor research. And craft high-quality and valuable SEO content to fill your site.
6. Integrate the core features
After implementing the design, you need to ensure the proper functionality of your site. With site builders, doing this is as easy as picking the needed plugins. Based on your business niche and the site goals you’ve defined earlier, list the core features your site needs to have and implement them by installing the necessary plugins.
Apart from implementing your business-specific features, think about universal solutions that must be there for proper performance. Namely, you may want to establish automated status pages, to map your incidents, monitor downtimes, and ensure your visitors are always happy.
7. Optimize for mobile
The growing number of mobile users, as well as Google’s long-standing mobile-first indexing, emphasize the importance of mobile optimization both for user satisfaction and high rankings. So, you need to take the time to optimize your site according to mobile best practices, too.
Here’s what you have to do:
- Make sure your design is responsive;
- Implement dynamic serving that will respond accordingly to every user’s device;
- Implement the same structured data for mobile and desktop;
- Optimize your media files to load fast and appear error-free on different screen sizes.
8. Optimize for maximum SEO performance
Once your site is almost ready to launch, you must take a few extra steps to ensure its SEO performance. To do this, follow the universal SEO tips, such as:
- Create actionable meta tags and descriptions for every page, featuring your target queries to boost click-through rates.
- Integrate your primary keywords into headings and subheadings, URLs, and other content elements.
- Reduce the amount of duplicate content.
- Link to relevant and high-quality external sources to boost trust.
- Implement internal links for more convenient navigation.
- Feature appealing and high-quality visuals to boost engagement and optimize them with descriptive alt texts.
9. Test and launch
Lastly, before launching your site and using it for your goals, you need to test it thoroughly. Leverage usability testing to measure the user experience of your site. Also, test for accessibility, loading time, and mobile-friendliness.
In the end, be sure to run a complete stress test. These tests simulate a real-life spike in traffic to test how well your website can handle high demand. And speaking about stress, tests, you may also want to pick your status page to ensure that your site continues delivering positive user experiences even during downtimes.
Based on the results of all these tests, detect the areas for improvement and fix the issues you’ve found. After this, feel free to launch your site.
Get ready to create a website that ranks
Although the importance of a quality, well-optimized site can’t be doubted today, many business owners are still wondering – “How to create a website for their business.” If you’re one of them, the good news is that now you have everything you need to ensure success.
From defining your site’s goals and picking a hosting provider to running a stress test and detecting errors – our step-by-step guide spans every stage of developing an SEO-friendly site. Leverage the knowledge and tips from this guide to get on the right track with your site, too, and don’t forget to learn more about status pages that can help you keep your visitors and customers happy in the long run, even during downtimes!
